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I skimmed the comments here, and never saw the real answer (to what I understand the question to be). Even though it was public knowledge, I had some extra insi
by inyourtenement 11y ago
I skimmed the comments here, and never saw the real answer (to what I understand the question to be). Even though it was public knowledge, I had some extra insight from working for a large Usenet provider.
The New York Attorney General started a campaign against child porn groups on Usenet. In the end, his office identified a small number of groups they said were used for child porn -- I think it was less than 100 groups. Many ISP's jumped on the opportunity to stop paying for Usenet service.
In the 90's it was just assumed that an ISP service would include Usenet. With the growth of binaries groups, the quality of service declined. I remember retention would be a day or two, with about 50% completion. So, for most ISP's, the service was unusable, and only a small number of subscribers knew or cared about it. The others paid quite a bit for service from a third party, like my employer. I don't know why they didn't shut down service earlier, but once the NYAG campaign started, they could cancel Usenet, saving themselves money, and getting good press for fighting child porn.
- thret 11y ago100 groups does not sound like a small number.
- DanBC 11y agoOut of fifty thousand? And we don't know the numbers of people posting to those groups, nor how often they posted, nor how many people were downloading from those groups. Mechanisms were around for providers to filter out groups used to distribute images of child sexual abuse, so that was one option. I think (bicbw) that the legal situation for providers was unclear in the 90s and they weren't sure if they were responsible or not.
- thret 11y agoI would intuitively expect murder to be more common than child sexual abuse, but perhaps I am being naive.
- DanBC 11y agoI don't know what you mean. Do you mean "more people are murdered than are sexually abused"? That's trivially disproved, although the numbers are tricky. One in twenty children are sexually abused. http://www.nspcc.org.uk/services-and-resources/research-and-resources/child-abuse-and-neglect-in-the-uk-today/ http://www.nspcc.org.uk/services-and-resources/research-and-... Or 27% of women and 16% of men were sexually abused as children. (Abstract doesn't give a country). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0145213490900777 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01452134909... In 2013/2014 there were less than 600 homicides recorded. In a population of 60m 1 in 20 is 3,000,000
- inyourtenement 11y agoHere are some detailed numbers. http://www.giganews.com/blog/2008/09/clearing-air-usenet-abuse-eliminating.html http://www.giganews.com/blog/2008/09/clearing-air-usenet-abu...